Valjean at the Barricade: Bring Him Home, Maybe
by Cordeliers Club
Summary: Crossing the musical with the book, Jean Valjean goes into a contemplative coma after Bring Him Home: is he sure it's Marius he wants to bring home? Valjean is in an awfully Kantian scenario. He'll think it out. Rating is for inner turmoil, Kant.


**Let me explain: **_in the musicalverse, Valjean stays up after everyone is finished singing Drink with Me and getting sloppy drunk (with each other) to sing Bring Him Home. This has always given me the impression that, not only is Valjean dead set on saving Marius (definitely not killing him), but he is scheming some scheme to screw the other Frenchboys; won't Cosette be happy to see he's brought her a Marius to love and snuggle and care for. I decided to inject a little Hugo into this scene, and make Valjean go into one of his Contemplation Comas about what he's just said in Bring Him Home. _

_Poor Valjean, only learned to read in prison, and now he's faced with awful Kantian scenarios and his poor stone heart is trembling like Colm Wilkinson's high notes. If you have any questions, or think that Valjean is maybe a stricter Kantian or think about Bahorel in longer paragraphs or want to fight me about the Colm Wilkinson crack or whatever, let me know! Since I'm writing in a pretty dead fandom. Cheers. _**  
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**Bring Him Home? Yes, Definitely. Maybe.**

Jean Valjean has had an experience that makes him unique among his fellows at the barricade, and this is having grown old. He was a base creature in his youth, the memories of this time are therefore dim and incoherent, but he recalls that youth makes everything faster and more burning: old men require less sleep. So at night within the barricade, Jean Valjean alone is awake.

He contemplates Marius Pontmercy, the boy who wrote to Cosette so lovingly. Valjean recalls the letter: even written, the boy tripped over his words, which were very passionate and (Valjean is old enough to know) a little bit silly. But so wildly earnest and—admirable in a man so consumed—very sweet. How he must make Cosette smile! He sleeps now, head in his arms on a barrel of gunpower.

Valjean closes one fist over the other and rests his chin on it, with a small smile perhaps at the gunpowder, deep in thought.

This is his thought: he has a plan to steal Marius away from the barricade should it fall, and back to the safety of having two feet on the ground. He knows how to descend under Paris. Valjean has seen suffering, but even the meanest creatures can live in the world. It is living in the ideal that cannot last and here, they are _barricaded_ in the ideal.

In the morning people will beat carpets and buy bread, rouse their children, go to work or pursue their pleasure with the joviality of dogs. The charming mundanity is so tempting for Jean Valjean it is palpable. Tomorrow Cosette will rise, she will stay inside and out of danger.

Here they are in danger, and it is because of freedom. What cares a mother for freedom when she can buy bread and find work! Vealjean is a peasant at heart, he knows a peasant's sensibilities. Fraternity is kicked by the wayside when one has children. Equality is sacrificed easily for domicile. That is it, he thinks wryly, a little ashamed at his peasant's thoughts in the company of these heroes. These boys are unwilling to countenance the quiet daily murders of liberty, equality and fraternity, and society will not flinch at murdering them in return.

All except Marius, that is, because Jean Valjean will rescue him, bring him back to the world of the peasant, and the bourgeois, and the slow accrual of a life.

Here he stops. How can he—he is a base creature inside still, but it is monstrous to _choose_. Next to Marius is a boy with his glasses in his hand, whom Valjean remembers having a quiet-voiced earnestness: Combeferre. This is a man he would have marched with. Good, purely good, in the way that sometimes people seem made of ideals and gifted with practicality. He wants education for every child. A greater mind by far than Marius, and more conscientious but Marius, with his sweetness, is beloved by Cosette.

That thought! Valjean cannot help but be sickened that it has arisen.

And what if Cosette had chosen different? Feuilly, he understands, is an orphan like herself, and a workingman. But he too is steeped in liberty and equality and fraternity; there is not a peasant's mind among these boys. Feuilly at least is poor, and though the poor die less remarked on than do rats: in droves, this poor boy will die a hero. Valjean reasons that he cannot take this.. Feuilly, Valjean sentences easily to death, because the poor know by instinct what benefits the poor. They are only unable to take the risk themselves, like the prisoners in Toulon, lifting a single foolhardy peer over the wall. When he was the Mayor, back in Montreuil-sur-mer, he would have adopted Feuilly; as a father now, and a man of no grand gestures he merely decides that Feuilly will die.

The bald young man Valjean cannot accurately name. Bossuet or Lesgle—of Meaux? If he is of Meaux and he dies, it will be very far from home. Valjean has heard he is unlucky; what chance does he imagine he has? Possibly he has come to the barricade resigned to die, as he joked earlier, in a freak accident. What cheerful things these boys are!

Almost as cheerful is Joly, who sleeps with his lovely mistress in his arms, unashamed inside the barricade—perhaps the mistress will rescue him. Perhaps looking in her eyes will turn around the mind? Perhaps she will extinguish the ideal in him, and kindle in its place the desire to grow old. Perhaps Valjean will talk to the mistress—Muischetta?—tonight.

Bahorel is Parisian entirely, seeming to belong nowhere. If he were to do figures, Bahorel would not be missed. Marius dead would break Cosette's heart. And though Valjean tries not to think that, Cosette is his family. And possibly Bahorel really can defend himself with a carbine; maybe he combines ideals with good aim.

The poet, Jehan Prouvaire, is younger than Joly, even Marius, he is tragically young. He replied to someone's teasing earlier that a poet is "the conscience of society"—imagine, a society with conscience! A society answerable to more than the immediate concerns of bread and children! This is Jehan Prouvaire's effect, to cause people to imagine that the giddiest dreams are tangible. Where the others dress usually, in waistcoats and cravats, Jehan Prouvaire in the time-honored tradition poets have of living life simultaneously with metaphor, has left his throat bare. Valjean is a father; his fingers tremble to close the gaping collar and neaten the ribbon half out of the boy's hair. Valjean swallows his peasant's fastidiousness and leaves the child asleep, gray-brown curls in his face, a musketoon fully assembled in his lap.

Courfeyrac, the young rake, would have come around eventually. He was thoroughly bourgeois. Heroic, but also bourgeois, and even heroic he would want to get married, or graduate. He, of them all, lived most often in the world, and in ten years he would think this revolution fanciful. Valjean can see Courfeyrac in ten years so accurately, a cane and a silk hat and an elegant wave of the hand, talking about his wild youth, some brief foolishness at the barricade. Courfeyrac's bravery is the only curse about him.

Marius is superior to none of them. Marius represents no change—Marius saves no other life—perhaps they will all endure, Valjean thinks a little madly. Or perhaps he can convince them all to give this up! But Valjean, a peasant, cannot understand; he knows he cannot understand anything of what these young men desire.

They are willing to give their lives up for freedom.

He gave up his freedom for a loaf of bread.

Even in his perfect world in Montreuil-sur-mer, he could only ever do good, he cannot get his mind around overturning the world. He knows something of their ideals: revolution, but _civilization_--perhaps he should save the philosopher Combeferre, the young Mirabeau, or more properly a warlike Rousseau. He wanted education for every child; Jean Valjean could not imagine a France with such birthrights and such conscience—conscience! A society of conscience! Save the poet! he thinks this in a momentary frenzy. Enjolras the logic of the revolution, Combeferre the philosophy—Courfeyrac, who represents its center—or Prouvaire, its conscience?

Monstrous to choose.

In the end, Cosette is in love with Marius, and Marius with Cosette. Jean Valjean, a peasant at heart, influenced by mundane things; life, love, bread and children, will save Marius if the barricade falls. He knows the tunnels under Paris.

If the barricade falls, he will allow the ideal to fall once again under the heavy tread of society, and Jean Valjean will not shed a tear. The loss of Enjolras, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, and Prouvaire he will feel—but the loss of logic, philosophy, center and conscience will not touch him. It is mad to think it will. He will give them the night, however, he is old and awake and he will spend the night gazing at the stars and wondering in what world their ideals would have been carried, afloat like a ship, on the willing arms of some imagined people.


End file.
